My Southern Journey (21 page)

Smart people, people with doctorates and others with decades of experience in the oil fields, worked for a solution, thought hard, thought long, but eventually, every time people onshore heard the term
brain trust
at a press conference, their hopes sank a little lower, and they ground their teeth.

My daddy loved to drink and he loved to fish, and though he took me with him drinking a dozen times, he never took me fishing. I never had a boy of my own. But when I married Dianne in 2005, I inherited a 10-year-old boy, Jake. He can whup a guitar like it’s going out of style, and sing like a fallen angel, and I am glad that he is mine, at least part of the time. I took him fishing in the Gulf because that is what a good man does, or at least a man trying to be. We left from Orange Beach and went out in the blue with a friend of his we called Taco, because he likes tacos, and we caught fish after fish, red snapper and mackerel and fish I had never seen, and I would have liked it if the boy and I could have talked about life a little bit, or adventures, or maybe even dreams. But instead he and his buddy just hooted and giggled and acted like the
dumbasses little boys are as the spray from the speeding boat drenched them on every bounce, and they laughed out loud.

At first, people just wanted the comfort of numbers, how long their Gulf would be fouled, how many fish or birds or turtles would die, how many shrimpers, oystermen, fishermen, hotel maids, short-order cooks, and all the rest would be wiped out, run off, how many families who made their living here for generations would be ruined, or just leave. Then, as attempt after attempt failed, they began to imagine the unimaginable, that the whole damn thing would become a dead zone, a kind of poisoned lake, leaching into the Atlantic and beyond.

The skeptics and the old salts said such people were just a bunch of Chicken Littles, said there was just too much water out there to worry about doomsday, that the Gulf would cleanse itself, even as the oil rolled into balls of tar in the waves. It was just thin oil, they said, not thick crude, and chemical dispersants would break it up so that the microorganisms in the Gulf could just gobble it up. When it did not immediately foul all the beaches, bays, and estuaries of states east of Louisiana, indignant, desperate sea captains and chamber of commerce officials said it was just a scare, that it was environmental types who were really putting them out of business, with rumors and lies.

And then came the pitiful proof. Oil-slimed pelicans struggled to lift off the glistening water and just hung there in the mess, confused, beaten. Tar balls rolled in the dingy surf, gummed up the beaches. The fish and the shrimp and the turtles and the crabs ingested the toxins, and began to die.

People strung booms, built berms, prayed.

In June, the oil rolled just offshore in Baldwin County. We went, my family and I, to wade, and bob in the water, and just look at it, before the oil crept in. But it was no good. Every cool wave just reminded me of what would be lost. I thought of that line from Tennyson, about casting a shade, a shadow, on such a delightful thing as this, and I wanted to beat the water with my fists.

THE YANKEE MYSTIQUE

T
he cold had teeth in it, in ’93. I walked from the old house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I felt it bite me through my clothes, before I had taken a second step. There was snow on the ground but it was old snow, weeks old, glittering, frozen hard as marble. By my third step my legs were already going numb. It was dark, just a few steps from Harvard Yard, from those great halls of enlightenment, but the Southern gothic in me could not help but wonder if I might just freeze stuck to the ground in this foreign place, freeze into a statue that the students would gaze upon with great curiosity in the morning light. I turned around and almost leapt back onto the porch, snatching at the door, almost clawing for the warmth inside. Say what you want to about these Northerners, but don’t call them weak-willed, don’t call them soft. A creature that can live in this, live like this, deserves our respect, even our admiration. But I could not help but wonder if maybe my kinfolks had been right, when I was a child. Maybe the Northerners are an altogether different people, maybe even a different species. “They ain’t like us,” my kin used to say. Well at least, I thought as the door closed behind me and the feeling came back in my legs, they have much finer long underwear.

The next winter, a record one for nasty cold on the island of Manhattan, I stood at the doors to my apartment building in
Midtown as the doorman looked at me with something close to pity. He was a nice man, a New Yorker to his bones, and was especially kind to me after he heard my hillbilly accent. He told me everything twice, to make sure I understood. I steeled myself for the bite, that cold, cold bite, and stepped boldly onto a sidewalk crowded with Northerners who thought this was just brisk. I hit a patch of hard snow before I made it a block and a half, to slide and stumble spectacularly onto iconic Broadway itself, where a sea of dirty yellow taxis flowed around me as if I was Moses. No one even blew a horn. And again, I had to give them respect. Say what you want to about these Northerners, I thought, but these people do know how to drive in the snow.

I lived two winters up there, among them. I learned a lot.

I learned that, if you are a Southern boy, keep your behind at home.

I think I was 7 years old before I knew it was not a bad word.

I grew up just 20 miles or so from a big Army base, in the era of Vietnam, so the Northerners, though a distinct minority, were always among us. I would hear these accents I could barely understand, accents that sounded like the speaker was chewing on something that tasted unpleasant. I would look to the grown-ups for some kind of explanation.

“Well, son,” my uncles would say, “they’re Yankees.”

“Oh,” I would say.

“They can’t talk no other way,” my aunts would say.

“Oh,” I said.

“Bless their heart,” my aunts said.

In time, I came to understand that the mysterious Yankees, bless their heart, were from a place far, far away, a frozen land where people cut holes in the ice to fish.

But that part sounded made up to me.

I was told by the grown-ups that the Yankees sometimes had to wait till spring to bury their dead, and were sewn up in their long underwear in September because it wasn’t coming off till July. I was told they did not sell grits in their stores and did not even know what the word meant, did not like cornbread of any kind, and looked down on
us
because of the way
we
talked, or at least some of them did.

I was told they ate sardine-and-onion sandwiches and something called scrapple that was rumored to be even nastier than
chitlin’s, and they drank heavily from a clear spirit called vodka, which was manufactured from the heathen potato and not the sacred corn, as God and my whiskey-making ancestors intended. I was told they wrapped their tires with chains to traverse the frozen earth, that the never-ending snows piled so high and heavy on their houses it crushed them to sticks, and they had to shovel it out twice a day just to back out of the driveway to get a loaf of white bread, which they ate three meals a day. I was told their cars disintegrated into piles of rolling rust, from all the salt they spread on the iced-over roads, and only a fool bought a Yankee car. I was told they sometimes got hung up inside their own heads when they tried to pronounce the names of their
own
places, like
Baaaaa-ston
, and
Mine-soooooo-tah.

I was told we fought a great and bloody war with them a long, long time ago, and lost because they had all the cannon, and that the rich folks down here never really got over that … though the rest of us had more pressing concerns, like college football bowl games, where teams from the tundra sometimes beat even the vaunted Crimson Tide, and the Devil quite possibly hailed from a froze-hard place called Notre Dame.

I would learn it was a whole lot more complicated than that, this wonderment and animosity that swirled around the Yankee. But as a child of Alabama, in the insulated foothills of the Appalachians, it maybe took longer than it should have to figure it all out. In time I would discover that the Northerner was profoundly different yet still roughly the same species as me, even if they did sometimes wear cheese on their head.

I blame my slow development on the first Yankee I ever met, who was, oddly enough, my distant kin.

I might not have even met a Yankee, at least not until high school, had it not been for the great northern migration of working-class Southerners to Detroit, a migration that began even before I was born. By the time I was old enough to walk, in the early 1960s, it seemed every other family down here had a second cousin up in Michigan, living on white bread, searching hopelessly for grits and hanging bumpers on Cadillacs. They married up there, to women who had never even seen an iron skillet, and brought their funny-talking progeny home to mystify us at family reunions and sometimes Christmas.

One of them, a cousin, came down to live among us.

I was maybe 5 or 6, but intelligent for my age. You might not
understand everything that is said, when you are so small, but you can feel unease, tension, the same way a dog can. I like to think I was at least as observant of the human condition as your average Golden Retriever.

This young man, in his late teens, acted like he had fallen from the moon. He looked around this corner of the South, at us, at our small wood-frame houses and our food and the way we lived, and spent every moment after, it seemed, gazing longingly back at the moon.

One day, after doing some work with other young men in the family for a farmer who lived close to us, the farmer paid them and told them, if they wanted, they could go into the garden and pick a mess of turnip greens to take home to their mamas.

“I ain’t gonna eat them weeds,” the Yankee boy said.

The old farmer nodded.

“I’d rather eat manure,” the boy said.

The old farmer nodded again.

“Well, son,” he said after a while, “I guess it all depends on what you’re used to.”

It was about then that my extended family gathered for a barbecue, and I remember it as one of the most elaborate I had ever seen. It had been a good year for hogs, and I can still see the clean, white butcher paper that was wrapped around what must have been fifty pounds or more of pork. The men of the family had built a pit out of concrete blocks and wire grate that seemed about as long as a Studebaker. On it, after the coals were cooked down, they laid on fresh ham and pork chops and about 1,000 weenies, basting the cooking meat now and then with homemade barbecue sauce they had mixed in half-gallon jars.

I think I ate six pork chops and two hot dogs and would have had more but my mother was afraid I had injured myself; that, and the fact someone had prepared a banana pudding in an honest-to-God washtub, and it was calling my name. When I was done with my chops, my mother carefully raked them off into the trash, to the great distress of the hounds and beagles milling around, begging.

You have to be careful with pork chop bones, which can be jagged, and brittle. Like chicken bones, they can splinter in a dog’s mouth, and choke them to death. My mother and aunts policed the bone disposal, since none of the men could be trusted with anything that required that much forethought and common sense.